America's kids need "more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers" if they're going to grow up to be world-class engineers, tweeted Vivek Ramaswamy, the American-born son of Indian immigrants. American culture "celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ," he complained.
"Tiger Mother" Amy Chua never let her daughters attend a sleepover, she brags in her memoir.
Sleepovers are educational, argues Suzy Weiss on The Free Press. At sleepovers, "you learned that different families had different cultures, and different rules, and you learned how to be a guest, and how to exist outside the sphere of your own family."
"Learning how to shave your legs, how to do your hair, how to use a tampon, or in my case learning that your eyebrows need an overhaul are all things that happen at sleepovers," she writes. "But it wasn’t just about going to war with our own body hair; it was the crucible where girls grow up."
Not being invited was "a lesson in the brutal facts of life." Girls learned to cope.
It's good practice for college dorms and sororities, she adds. Nowadays, "kids show up to college today never having fostered intimacy with another person."
"But sleepovers are threatened, and not just by parents anxious about their kids getting enough sleep before a debate tournament or studying enough vocabulary words to ace the SAT," Weiss writes. Safety-conscious parents are "afraid their kid might get molested or traumatized at someone else’s house."
Some families are opting for the safer and more civilized “sleep under” where kids get dressed in their PJs and watch a movie — supervised, I’m sure — only for everyone to be picked up before bedtime.
"Sleep unders" are low risk. But also low reward.
It's hard to believe American kids who've never played "Truth or Dare" will be the entrepreneurs of the future. We need more mathletes, but they won't get very far if they can't adapt to new rules and function without their parents.
America needs creative risk-takers, not just kids groomed from pre-school to compete for the Ivy League, writes River Page, also in The Free Press.
Only the super stars in the tech world are able to get by without much/any soft social skills. The rest will need them if they want to get things done and to advance in the company. Sleep overs help develop the soft skills, especially if smart phones are given to a parent at the door and only returned when leaving.